iPhone Duo bend test doesn't end well

Earlier today, we wrote about iFixit's teardown of the iPhone Duo, which addressed some of the concerns about the phone's inner folding screen and its hinge design - we've already seen plenty of reports about the inner screen getting damaged, even though the iPhone Duo only became available (in limited quantities, no less) a few days ago.

Apple iPhone Duo

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Now we can shift our attention towards another important question: will the iPhone Duo bend? And for that we can only look towards Zack from the YouTube channel JerryRigEverything, who's been trying to bend phones left and right for years now. So here's his traditional 'durability' test, performed on the iPhone Duo this time.

Spoiler alert: bending the iPhone Duo doesn't snap it in half, but it doesn't end well either. After one bend, the inner screen develops a permanent line on it, after a second bend more lines appear, and then after a third bend, the inner display becomes unresponsive and unusable even though it doesn't turn off altogether.

It's important to note that an out of warranty iPhone Duo inner screen repair, if you don't have AppleCare+, will set you back an insane $999, so this is definitely something to keep in mind. However, before performing these bend tests, Zack tried to fill the iPhone Duo's hinge mechanism with as much dust, sand, and debris as possible, and some of it clearly got stuck in there - you can hear it when he tries to close the phone, and it's actually preventing it from closing entirely.

While we can't say for sure that the debris has contributed to the inner display's issues after each bend, we also can't conclusively rule that out, so things aren't clear cut. At least not from this example alone. Anyway, given how much that screen repair costs, we would of course caution you against taking the iPhone Duo to the beach, and you should probably also avoid sitting on it by mistake when it's open. For your wallet's sake.